Have I ever wondered how all the cognition, awareness, deception, … (maybe all terms in social science) were measured?
The answer is that yes, and all the time. Actually, there have been a field call “Scale Measurement” how to establish, validate, … those scales.
Recently, I conducted a analysis for a project “Mid-life Stress Exposure, Physiological Dysregulation, and Cognitive Function: A Longitudinal Mediation Analysis with Latent Growth Models.” Very interestingly, here are the descriptive of all its measurement.
Cognitive Function.
- Cognitive data are based on a modified version of the Telephone
Interview of Cognitive Status (m-TICS; Table below).
- Other measures of cognitive function, such as the Mini Mental State
Examination (MMSE), exist, however, the TICS is the only measure
available in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for the age range of
interest, 51-64 years old and the TICS is a validated measure that has
been shown to produce similar findings to the MMSE106 and to have a high
interclass correlation coefficient.
- The HRS uses 4 different cognitive tests from the m-TICS to assess
different types of memory and function. These tests will be summed to
create a 27-point measure of overall cognitive function, where higher
values indicate greater functioning.
Cognitive Measures
| Measures | Description |
|---|---|
| Immediate word recall | Episodic Memory. Recall a list of 10 words in any order (range: 0-10) |
| Delayed word recall | Episodic Memory. Repeat the list of 10 words from the immediate recall test (range: 0-10) |
| Serial 7’s subtraction | Working Memory. Subtract 7 from 100 and continue subtracting 7 from each subsequent number 5 times (range: 0-5) |
| Backwards counting from 20 | Mental Processing Speed. Count backwards from 20 (range: 0-2) |